Category: Blogging

Your website links acts as badges of authority and reliance for the Google bots. The more links your site has, the higher is its rank going to be. Sounds quite simple, but is it as simple as it seems right now? Then, how come more websites do not adopt link building strategies? Does link quantity link linearly with authority? How does Google evaluate the plethora of links a site collects over time? Do all links bear the same value?

Today, we are here to answer all these questions.

The first rule of the thumb is the more authoritative the domain of the link source is, the more authority it bears. When a new website without many readers is a source of a link, you must know that the link will not contribute much authority to your site. Such new websites are low authority sites that will benefit you, but slightly.

When you get links from reliable and more established sources like the NY Times, BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post, you will enjoy higher authority. The value of a link directly depends upon the organic traffic of the sources site, their bounce rate and their overall visibility on a popular search engine like Google.

The relevance of the sources

We have mentioned three of the most popular blogging and news sites of today in the previous section. They are not the only ones bearing such high authority. There are hundreds, and possibly thousands of such sites with similar page ranks. Does that mean you can link your website to any of these thousand sites or even all of them? Will the links bear equal value to Google?

Let us say, you are posting something on digital marketing and SEO. You can link it to an article on digital marketing, social media marketing, and search engine marketing on the Sacramento SEO 7Storms website or Huff Post, but linking them to Allrecipes.com will not bear much impact as your readers will not find much on digital marketing on a culinary site. It is a game of relevance that you need to comprehend.

Most blogging sites and websites have several categories for each topic they write on. We are not saying it is impossible to find something on digital marketing on a culinary website; we are saying you need to go ahead and find it to link it to your content. Your link should make sense to your readers.

Contextually connected

Aside from overall relevance in the topic, you need to ensure that your link is sitting amidst content that connects with the topic of the source page. Ever since RankBrain came into existence, the effect of contextual relevance has become more prominent in terms of link authority and SEO.

It is different from anchor text selection. Several years before Hummingbird, SEOs believed that the anchor text should also be your keyword that linked to a contextual source page. Thankfully, this belief is obsolete. Google can easily detect manipulation of links and anchor texts. So you can just use any naturally occurring text as the anchor text.

What’s the reputation of the destination?

People judge you by the neighborhood you hang around, so is true for Google. The search engine giant always judges the authority and reputation of the destination page your links point to. Therefore, only pick websites and pages with value-adding content. They should not only be relevant, but they should also have a page rank of 4 or higher on the Google Toolbar.

Do not discount other impact factors that determine quality. The quality of the destination will assess the overall quality of your links and your webpage content.

Google digs diversity

Google likes to see a little bit of diversity as far as links and the destination are in question. Domain diversity is a huge factor and Google will check the number of unique domains your site contains links to. You need to pay close attention to linking source, destination URL, and anchor texts to improve your own PageRank and SEO.

Simply speaking – it is essential to get five links from 5 different publishers with high authority. Procuring ten links from the same website/publisher will have little effect on your SEO strategies.

Most importantly, you need to think outside the box. Think of human users and not just your regular Google crawler bots. While you need to ensure that your link building strategy looks natural to Google, you also need to ensure that your readers have a cohesive experience while reading your website content. The approach that works for your friend or your target competitor might not be the winning strategy for you. Understand your linking profile, your keyword plan and device your own strategy that helps your visibility.

Conventional outlook and hype had it that SEO is a big idea whereas carefree marketing is a process. Far from it, these two are originally processes and strategies that are intertwined, blended one that they cannot be separated such from the disparate, and someday more, nothing precedes the other. To have a well known, the other am about to exist.

These two must nevertheless not be confused to perform the same gift, inasmuch as they do not at all. Whereas accompany engine optimization is the style of enhancing a website’s visibility and soothe of access during a attend engine accompany results, cheerful marketing is a marketing practice that involves the creating and show and tell of an arm and a leg, regular and appropriate blithe, by all of an eagerness of attracting, acquiring and retaining customers.

How SEO and content marketing blend

SEO demands content and Content marketing is content- SEO cannot practically exist without content, which is why it creates demand by enhancing the website’s visibility so that it is easily accessible and attracts traffic.Content marketing accomplishes that by availing the content for the website.

SEO demands keywords and content marketing uses keywords- SEO heavily relies on use, tracking and research of keywords to raise the ranking of the websites. Content marketing requires you to have a critical approach in use of keyword by strategically positioning them throughout content.

SEO demands linkbacks while content marketing introduces linkbacks- a key strategy in SEO is use of linkbacks (external links), which allows the website to rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs). To implement this, the content being marketed must allow its targeted market to link back to it.

SEO demands consistent output while consistency is paramount in content marketing- for successful SEO, the content in the website must be consistent. The older the content gets in the webpages, the lower its value drops. For this to be possible, good content marketing strategy comes into play whereby you must maintain a consistent flow of information to maintain its relevance.

These two online strategies are highly entwined where you cannot be a SEO expert, unless you are an expert in content marketing too. There is no way you can be one and not the other, as the two are interdependent in order to have success in any or both of them.

Before you lead out and entwine new cheerful, bring in stock of what you earlier have by the whole of an audit. Can you surge on it? What rolled, and what didn’t go completely so well? What has generated the close but no cigar traffic, or social affair of honor and links?

Knowing what easygoing you have is by the same token hugely satisfying in developing a profitable internal linking practice, which is sharps and flat for SEO. And if customers are in working order to be result your brand over this blithe, someday just every now and then, it’s germane to the way one sees it sure it’s up to many a moon and relevant!

There is no denying the impact a blog can have on your business. Blogging has better ROI compared to most marketing strategies and it also helps you interact with your target customers. Better still, you can quickly increase your brand’s authority in your niche by growing your followers. In a recent survey, B2B marketers who blog enjoyed 67% more leads than those who don’t.

With this in mind, it is understandable that almost every business now runs a blog. However, the success of most of these blogs is dismal, the main reason being poor content. Most bloggers simply take marketing content from their websites in the hope of increasing traffic but this doesn’t wash with readers.

Good content helps grow blogs faster and you will notice readers will start contributing. If you have been posting without any feedback from readers, it is likely that your content strategy is wrong.

Below are some tips to help you create effective blog content:

Keyword Research and optimization

This is already a belabored point in the search engine optimization (SEO) community. While everyone appreciates the role of keywords in page indexing and SERPs ranking, there are so many ideas on how they should be used. For a blogger, it is important to research and use keywords that are relevant but most importantly, ensure your content tallies with the keyword choice.

Once you have used keyword tools to get the best phrases, go ahead and put them to work. Use them in titles, Meta descriptions and headings. The idea is to give users exactly what they are searching for, hence the need to research on the right keywords. The trend now is to use long-tail phrases that users will most likely use on search engines.

Hook Readers Early

As a blogger, you have to appreciate that internet users have a short attention span. This means they are in a rush to find what they are looking for. Of course there is so much you would like to say in your post but it won’t matter if readers are not inspired to start reading.

One way to captivate their attention is by asking thought-provoking questions, using statistics, a quote or a story. Unlike the rest of your website content, a blog post is supposed to be personal, interactive and conversational.

Create Content that People Care About

Assume you are selling car spare parts in a particular city. If you are creating a blog post, it will obviously have something to do with cars. However, you can add a twist by talking about the main causes of accidents in your city.

Include research in your post and later advise readers on how to avoid such accidents by buying the right car parts and proper maintenance. People don’t really care about your business and it is up to you to show how your services and products can add value to their lives.

There are many other ideas to create great blog content; longer blog content, proper editing, simple language, unique content, punchy conclusions, using headings, and great blog design are other tips to consider. Whatever you do, make sure your blog content is captivating, fresh and relevant to your target audience.